But while his contemporaries often preferred to appeal to the intellect, García Lorca gained wide popularity by addressing basic human emotions. He possessed an engaging personality and a dynamic speaking style, and he imbued his writing with a wide range of human feeling, including awe, lust, nostalgia, and despair. "Those who knew him," wrote his brother Francisco in a foreword to
Three Tragedies, "will not forget his gift . . . of enlivening things by his presence, of making them more intense." The public image of García Lorca has varied greatly since he became famous in the 1920s. Known primarily for works about peasants and gypsies, he was quickly labeled a simple poet of rural life--an image he felt oversimplified his art. His death enraged democratic and socialist intellectuals, who called him a political martyr; but while García Lorca sympathized with leftist causes, he avoided direct involvement in politics. In the years since his death, his literary biographers have grown more sophisticated, revealing his complexity both as a person and as an artist.
To biographer Carl Cobb, García Lorca's "life and his work" display a "basic duality." Despite friends and fame García Lorca struggled with depression, concerned that his homosexuality, which he hid from the public, condemned him to live as a social outcast.
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